Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I hate that WWDC videos have essentially replaced docs. Videos have to be shallow, and code on slides has to be short. This medium is fine to sell an idea, and to give a high-level overview of how it works, but there's no way to include as much information as written documentation would.

Here's a TED talk on Thorium reactors. Why aren't you running them yet?

For all the hate it gets, I think the way PHP does their documentation is ideal. Easy to search for what you need, it recommends other, similar classes/functions, gives a good description of the inputs and what something is expected to return. Then, in addition to that, there's the user-supplied examples and commentary to help further clarify things. I really like the model they went with.

I concur. PHP is a horrible language, but I don't hate working in it. The documentation is the reason.

I concur and add that PHP has actually evolved quite nicely, and it's horribleness is merely an outdated meme. Java is still playing catchup to the stuff PHP has added in recent years.

Just because it was shit 15 years ago doesn't mean it's still shit now.

IMHO there are still some edges that drive you mad until you remember them but the documentation is really good and every release is full of improvements. Also many available frameworks and tools in PHP world are outstanding. For me PHP provides a serious Rapid to Market Edge.

is the PHP standard library still an inconsistent mess?

The inconsistencies are either fully removed (many in 7.x, more in 8.x), deprecated, or at least very well documented these days (e.g. with top level documentation warnings about any potential pitfalls).

That's certainly true for the standard library and the documentation on the language itself. However for the internals, this wasn't always the case and it looked more like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060626083819/http://www.php.net...

Agreed -- and the examples in the user comments were invaluable to me way back when I was getting started.

I also really dislike that WWDC videos are now the de-facto documentation. It must be a lot of work to put them together – I wish they'd just write a doc instead. Would be way faster to read, search, etc. and could probably go into much greater depth.

Example programs would be nice too.

Many of them do come with sample code, but like the content of the sessions themselves, they age out very quickly.

Yeah but on the other hand, I'm sure they look at the vibrant 3rd party tutorial content pipeline as evidence that they're doing the right thing.

Same; there's so much important information in the WWDC videos, and part of me wanted to watch them all when I was still doing iOS development. But I can't watch videos, I don't have the attention span, and sitting to watch / listen just makes me go to sleep.

It's a me thing, not down to the presenters or anything. But all that I ask is documentation and / or blog posts.

I hope that anyone that is making a presentation also writes down the contents as a blog post and/or documentation. Please. For examples, Go's blog is pretty good (although there too one is often pointed at a presentation or slide deck for certain subjects)

Global search for all WWDC transcripts also isn't good on the website, you now how to reveal the transcript for each individual result after you search. In the Apple Developer app (where I would've expected a better user experience) it's not even possible.

Try out https://asciiwwdc.com next time you need this.

On top of that they often contain pre-first-beta information so they are rapidly obsolete. Although the gist of the information is useful, the signatures and examples are not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com